Suggested Reading

It is often the case that those with a strong religious faith, hold this in the face of significant evidence to the contrary, and tend to be quite selective about what they read / watch / listen to. This selectivity tends to reinforce prior assumptions. Consider the ladder of inference (by Chris Argyris) which Gene Bellinger has modified to become acycle of inference.

Bellinger says “This diagram indicates that as our Beliefs influence the Selected Data and Experience we pay attention to, they essentially establish an internal reinforcing loop which short circuits reality. The tendency is to select data to pay attention to which supports our beliefs. And, I would expect, as our Beliefs become more and more rigid the Selected Data & Experience we are willing to pay attention to will become a smaller and smaller portion of reality”

Michael Shermer also hits the nail on the head when he talks about why smart people believe weird things in his book. Two of the key elements are an intellectual attribution bias and the confirmation bias described in the diagram above.

Here is a challenge to Muslims: Try and break out of the cycle and fully read some of these materials and then make your own mind up, rather than simply accepting some summary from some religious (Islamic) authority figure who has a biased view (and probably hasn’t read it either). This will take some time and effort, but it will put you in a better position in terms of at least understanding the various viewpoints – even if you still chose to reject them.

Note that some of these materials are now out of copyright and are freely downloadable as eBooks from sites such asAmazon and Project Gutenberg. While NZ is a beautiful and a great place to be, it takes weeks to order books from overseas – so try your local library or get an eBook reader for instant downloads. Some of these books are physically huge and non-portable in paper format; eBook readers are great for portability also. You can use Calibre to convert between ebook formats and manage your electronic library. Calibre has versions for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Author

Title

Comments

Get it From

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The Gospel of Barnabas

Barnabas get Muslims all excited because it portays Jesus (Yeshua) as a man, not supernatural in any sense.

Same comments as for the Bible. Most Muslims have not read it in its entirety. Certain bits get quoted out of context on a regular basis. Read it to get the context. Surprisingly perhaps, a prerequisite for reading the Quran is having read the Bible. Once you have read more widely you will realise that in fact the style of the Quran is referential… “you remember the time when …” and many of those references are to tales told in the Bible (cannonical or apochryphal) in more detail.

Autobiographical account by Somali-Dutch activist and politician. Her childhood and early life is typical of migrants from MENA. The latter half of the book shows how she moved on from that and actively rejected it.

The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

Your perception of reality is not necessarily the same as mine. Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. Follows on nicely from Eric Hoffer’s True Believer

A lengthy, detailed and awesome tome written by Fisk who was there on the ground as a Times and then Independent newspaper reporter. Provides real insight into the horror of many of the recent wars in the Middle East (usually Muslims killing Muslims)

Just a great poem. Reflections of life and love written by a well known Muslim around 1100 AD. In 2013, world famous Turkish pianist Fazil Say received a 10 month prison sentence for quoting Khayam on Twitter.

Very interesting to see how the underlying mindset of the monotheistic faiths play out and have a massive impact on the way we treat our world and ‘green’ issues. An important book to read (after you’ve read the rest of them on this list)

Pick the version and language of your choice. The New International Version (NIV) is an easy-to-read modern English version. The classic King James Version (KJV) can be difficult for those whose first language is not English. The Douay-Rheims version used by the Catholic church includes some apocryphal material missing from Protestant versions. A lengthy book and most Christians have not read it in it’s entirety. They might be shocked at some of the stuff hiding in there.

Sacred Books Of The East – Including Selections From The Vedic Hymns, Zend-Avesta, Dhammapada, Upanishads, The Koran, And The Life Of Buddha With Critical And Biographical Sketches By Epiphanius Wilson, A.M. Revised Edition 1900

Fascinating to see how items from the Zoroastrian faith found their way into the Qur’an and Islam. The parallels are not drawn in the book itself, but anyone who knows Islam well will see the many striking resemblances.

There are a number of items still extant that never made the cut into one of the well known canonical Bibles. They make for very interesting reading – they are the source of some of the Quranic references, but very few Christians have read them.

Brilliant, as only Voltaire can be. The wit and irony is amazing. It requires prior knowledge of the Bible and Christian beliefs to understand some of the irony. Without that, it is still a nice read but you’ll not get most of the jokes.

The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam’s Holy Book by Ibn Warraq

‘Classic’ in this case means ‘old’. However there is a huge value in these ‘orientalist’ essays. Impossible to dismiss entirely, it raises interesting questions – another must-read for Muslims. Mohammad Mohar Ali attempted a rebuttal (1997), which can be downloaded as a PDF (496 pages) from various sites.